A former Harvard professor recently argued that Heaven (yes, the Heaven where God lives) could have a physical location in the Universe.
The crazy thesis was presented in an opinion text by Michael Guillenin , and is based on a theological reading of passages from the Christian Bible combined with a concept from modern cosmology: the so-called “cosmic horizon”, that is, the border of the observable Universe.
According to Guillén, this hypothetical ‘address’ would be located approximately 439 billion billion kilometers from Earth (approximately 4.39 × 10^23 km), a distance he describes as coinciding with the limit from which light would never reach us.
The proposal is speculative and does not correspond to accepted scientific knowledge. Guillén does not present an observational result or a new physical model; rather, it proposes an interpretation that seeks to bring religious language closer to notions of relativity and expansion of the Universe, explains , who notes that the argument has generated reactions from cosmology experts, who consider the physical reading of the “horizon” to be conceptually wrong.
What is a cosmological “horizon”
The idea begins at a relatively consensual point: the observable universe has limits. Because light travels at a finite speed, we can only see objects whose radiation has had time to reach us since the beginning of the cosmos. Hence the notion of “observable universe”: the region of space from which light (or other signals) could reach Earth in the time available.
If the universe were static and did not expand, this horizon would continually increase. As time passed, light from increasingly distant regions would eventually arrive, expanding what we could observe. But the real universe is not static: it is expanding. And this expansion decisively changes what can and cannot be seen.
Here comes the Hubble lionswhich describes the relationship between the distance at which an object is and the speed at which it moves away due to the expansion of space between us and that object. Generally speaking, the further away a galaxy is, the faster it moves away. After a certain point, Guillén argues, the speed of recession reaches the value of the speed of light. This limit is often treated, in accessible language, as a boundary for observation: beyond a certain distance, the light emitted today by these regions will never reach us, because the space “in between” stretches too quickly.
In his text, Guillén translates this boundary into numbers and states that a galaxy approximately 439 billion billion kilometers from Earth (equivalent to 4.39 × 10^23 km) would “move” at approximately 300 thousand km/s, the speed of light. This distance, he writes, would correspond to the cosmic horizon.
“Time stops”
It is from here that the argument moves into religious terrain. Guillén establishes a parallel between the biblical idea that the heaven is inaccessible to humans while alive and the notion of a region of the universe from which we cannot receive information.
And he goes one step further: he states that, on the “cosmic horizon”, the time “for”there being only a kind of timelessness. In this reading, space would continue to exist “beyond” the horizon, which would make this region “habitable”, although only by “light” or “light-like” entities.
Observation boundary is not a “place”
Critics dispute that the “horizon” is a kind of physical wall of the universe, or a special place where the laws of time stop working. In the current interpretation of cosmological models, the horizon is nothing more or less the limit of observation of the observer: defines how far we can receive light and information, given the age of the universe and the way space expands.
An example used to counter the idea of “time that stops” uses expansion itself: light from very distant regions reaches us strongly redshifted and “stretched” in time. This makes, from our point of view, certain phenomena appear to occur extremely slowly. But this effect is observational: it does not mean that, in the place of origin, events have actually slowed down or stopped. Inverting the point of view, a hypothetical observer very far away would see the Earth “slow down” due to the same type of effect and, even so, life here would continue, normally.
Furthermore, these horizons are observer dependent. Each point in the universe has its own cosmological horizon: the limit of what it can see and what it can, in principle, receive as a signal. The idea of choosing the horizon “of the Earth” as a privileged address for a deity is, from a scientific point of view, arbitrary.
